Month: March 2015

Gail Nichol reviewed the recent discussions between the Library and senior university members on how to support the acquisition of reputation metrics for use by faculty, departments and divisions. Several librarians shared stories of how they are currently supporting faculty and departmental requests for information.

Trends we noticed:

Although the H-index isn’t perfect, it has become the de facto tool for inter-institutional and inter-departmental comparisons. Most understand its limitations.

Supporting faculty and departmental requests for metrics is time-intensive, with no one-size-fits-all approach. Nevertheless, there is an important role for U of T librarians to support these kinds of requests at the divisional, departmental and individual level.

It is not easy to construct profiles even with tools like Web of Science and Scopus, that enable automatic generation of H-indices, so wider exposure to these kinds of tools and their capabilities is an area of interest. Be patient, there’s a learning curve.

Librarians are interested in further training and development to support their work in the area of metrics, and expressed interest in creating an information space to share information, strategies, and approaches to various requests.

Annotated_bibliography_reputation_metrics_final (2015): selective annotated bibliography on reputation metrics in the arts, humanities and social sciences. If you only read one, read the Hirsch interview. If you read two, read the Federation of Social Sciences and Humanties working paper on alternative metrics.